William Faulkner Life Quotations

I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.

A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, It moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immotality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artists way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest